On February 2, 1848, a treaty was signed ending the American war with Mexico. California became a part of the United States. At the time, this event didn’t seem so momentous. In the eyes of Washington, California was a distant backwater, reachable only after a long and perilous sea voyage. The population of the entire state was less than 20,000. Some maps showed it as an island.
But less than two weeks earlier, unbeknownst to those who signed the treaty, a young man named James Wilson Marshall, in charge of building a lumber mill in the Sacramento Valley, saw something shining in the bottom of a ditch. “The piece was about half the size and of the shape of a pea,” he later said. “Then I saw another piece in the water.”
Gold.
Wilson and his colleagues swore to keep quiet about what they’d found but the secret was too exciting, too great. A merchant named Sam Brannan rode down from the hills into San Francisco, then a village of less than one thousand souls, swinging his hat in one hand while the other rattled a plump bag. “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” he shouted. Word spread, leaped across the continent, and within a few months the lust had penetrated every corner of the globe. And so they came, the seekers after quick riches: 2,000 by the beginning of June 1848, 4,000 by the end of July. One hundred thousand within a year. Mexico had lost a territory, and the United States had gained a youthful state that was already defining itself by bonanza.
“California has not grown or evolved so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions,” wrote Carey McWilliams in 1949. “This highly improbable state. This symbol of a cruel illusion.” The gold rush was the first of these “chain-reaction explosions,” and it drew Collis Huntington to California. Huntington himself would be the great driver of the second “explosion,” the building of the transcontinental railroad. His place in the history of the state he never much liked is central, and his achievement both fixed and complicated the illusion that may indeed be cruel: that in this place the gold rush is still on, is always on, in one form or another.
COLLIS POTTER HUNTINGTON was born on October 21, 1821, in a small Connecticut valley known as Poverty Hollow. He was the sixth child of nine, his father a failed farmer who advised his son: “Don’t be afraid to do business with a rascal, only watch him. Avoid a fool.” Huntington’s upbringing was poor, though not quite the hellish Dickensian struggle that he, in common with other industrial titans who hauled themselves up by their bootstraps, depicted later. He left school at thirteen to work as a hired hand but then became an itinerant peddler, a typical figure of the pre–Civil War era, trudging from town to town with watches, pins, needles, knives, and cheap silverware in two tin boxes that he carried over his shoulders and, when he had a little more money, in a rickety wagon pulled by a mule. He learned how to live rough, in lawless conditions, and with sometimes criminal companions he met on the road. “He could reach a penny half a grab of whoever was trying to beat him,” writes David Lavender, one of his more recent biographers.
Huntington was, and would remain, the ingenious Yankee, always out there “a-doin’,” shrewd, caustic, adventurous, a gambler, with instincts both fine-tuned and ruthless, not likeable necessarily, but somehow admirable, like the relentless great white in Jaws. “Young man, you cannot follow me through life by the quarters I have dropped,” he would later, superbly, say, though tracking the money is as good a way of fixing the path of this great capitalist’s life as any. He was married, for the first time, in 1844, to Elizabeth Stoddard, a childhood friend (the words “sweetheart” and “Collis Huntington” somehow don’t go together) who brought with her a small dowry. He went to work in the three-story store his brother had built from quarried stone in Oneonta, New York. Soon he was a partner in the solid enterprise, and bored. News of the gold rush sounded in his ears like a bugle.
On March 15, 1849, Huntington shipped out from New York aboard the Crescent City, taking with him rifles, medicines, socks, and kegs of whiskey. He’d heard stories of fortunes made on the frontier, but he was no romantic. “Gold is buried in the ground. You have to dig to get it out,” he later wrote. “I never had any idea or notion of scrambling in the dirt.” Rather, he’d observed that in San Francisco in 1849 a shovel sold for $25 and a butcher’s knife for $30. A loaf of bread, costing four cents in New York, sold for 75 cents. A single bottle of beer was $2—1849 dollars! Prices were exorbitant. One man, traveling with 1,500 New York newspapers in his baggage, disposed of the lot at $3 apiece within two hours of landing. Huntington reckoned that if he positioned himself close to the frenzy he’d make his pile. He intended to trade.
In 1849 traveling from New York to San Francisco was in itself an odyssey. There was no feasible landward route, and sailing to Calcutta was safer, shorter, and easier than going around Cape Horn and the southernmost tip of the Americas. Huntington took the only other possible way, the most expensive (his steerage ticket cost more than $250), via the isthmus crossing at Panama. The journey, some 5,450 miles, should have taken forty-five days or so, but when the Crescent City reached the isthmus no connecting ship was waiting on the other side to take its passengers north. For two months they were stranded in the stinking mud and torrential rains of Panama. “Death is carrying off the Americans most fearfully,” Huntington wrote to his brother. “There are eight to ten deaths a day.” Alligators, snakes, poisonous lizards, and worms; cholera, dysentery, malaria, yellow fever: Huntington proved immune. He tramped thirty-nine miles through the jungle, loaded a small boat with jerked beef, potatoes, rice, sugar, and syrup, brought back the supplies, and sold them. He left New York with $1,200 cash. By the time he left Panama, aboard a Dutch sailing ship, the Alexander von Humboldt, he had $5,000 in his billfold. But then the Humboldt was becalmed, for almost three weeks, until even the weevilly biscuits and tainted water started to run out. Decades later, the grateful survivors formed a club, the Society of the Humboldters, meeting annually to recall their ghastly experience.
Huntington arrived in San Francisco more than five months after he’d set out, a richer, leaner, and harder man. He stepped ashore on August 31, 1849. Behind him were more than two hundred ships of various kinds, many of them abandoned by their crews who’d rushed at once to the gold mines. In front of him was the throng of the world’s fastest growing city. On all sides were ramshackle buildings, most just begun or half-finished, canvas sheds a lot of them, open at one end, and decorated with signs in most of the world’s languages. The mud of unpaved and unboarded streets squelched beneath his feet. He smelled smoke from one of the fires that broke out frequently. “Gold had brought thousands of treasure seekers,” he later wrote. “And a horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them. On all sides of you were gambling houses, each with its band of music in full blast; fortunes were being won and lost; terrible imprecations rose among the horrid wail and it seemed to me pandemonium was let loose.” Cutthroat gangs prowled the streets; hordes of rats and wild dogs scurried through the heaps of garbage and sewage that lay everywhere. Armies of fleas jumped up the trouser leg.
Huntington had imagined that he would set up a store. On learning that rent for the small space he needed to pitch a tent was $3,000 a month (in 1849 dollars) he headed for Sacramento, paying his way by helping to load the schooner on which he sailed. Located on a wedge between the Sacramento and American Rivers, a year earlier Sacramento had been little more than a jetty. Now it was a collection of tents and crude wood-frame buildings, all organized along a grid system, bringing some notional semblance of order. That, anyway, was the theory. In reality, Sacramento was like its counterpart by the bay: an anarchic Barbary Coast town. Among the 10,000 inhabitants in 1850, there were only two families with children. But Huntington knew he’d found the right place. This was the starting point for many of the mining fields and he was that much closer to the prospectors. Moreover, demand for what he had to sell was vast and would only grow. “More distinctly than all else he realized that where Gold is King, as in a mining country, Extravagance and High Prices make up his Court,” wrote George Miles, one of his hired hagiographers, in 1896. Huntington liked the look of the market. He opened up business in a tent.
Like millions who’ve come to California since, he hoped to make his pile and leave. But, like the vast majority of those millions, he struggled, and in the process defined himself. “Each individual westerner expected to become wealthy and famous; each city expected to become the metropolis of the west; before this spirit obstacles disappeared as if by magic. Some of them later reappeared with increased force and potency, but others were gone forever,” wrote the historian R. E. Riegel in 1926. Huntington would indeed become wealthy and famous. But first there were the obstacles. Those early years in Sacramento saw drought, floods, riots, cholera, and a shortage of goods. “I was robbed and came close to despair,” he recounted. He hauled his wares by mule to the mountains and traded with miners fanning out in search of gold. Then he trudged back down again, moving between Sacramento and San Francisco, keeping an eye on the signals from Telegraph Hill that told him when another ship was clearing the Golden Gate. He bought a pair of binoculars better to see incoming vessels. If one looked promising, he took his small boat out into the bay’s treacherous waters and, beating competitors to the punch, struck a deal then and there. All these anecdotes would be told much later, in famed old age, to the hired legmen of California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who published his fawning study Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth in 1890, when Huntington was eagerly promoting a righteous image. He had recently, and not for the first time, dodged the bullet in a congressional investigation. No doubt some pretty gloss was added to the tales. Equally, we can be sure that in the early 1850s he did lead a life of some danger, uncertainty, and adventure; such was the nature of the place and time. Once he walked fifty-four miles in a single night to deposit forty-five pounds of gold dust. “Everybody dealt with me,” he said. “I had a Panama hat that was very broad brimmed and came down to my shoulders. If my boat had capsized the hat might have floated while both me and my wares sank like stones.”
After twelve months in California he took a crucial step, once again undertaking the dangerous Panama isthmus crossing, traveling to New York so he could return with his wife and her sister, a huge investment of both family and capital. In Sacramento he found a house for his family near the river and, at a cost of $12,000, built a fine brick store. His values were already those of the prosperous man with something to protect. When vigilantes seized a pardoned robber and hanged him from a tree, Huntington noted approvingly: “Property is quite safe here to what it was before he was strung up.” He’d spoken too soon. On November 2, 1852, election day in Sacramento, arsonists set a fire that swept through the city. “A dense mass of smoke and flame shot upward from Madame Lano’s Millinery shop,” reported the Sacramento Union. A gale-force wind from the north gusted embers, starting fresh blazes before the frantic townsfolk could put the first ones out. Huntington’s store was filled with new stock only recently arrived and he fought hard to save it. He and Elizabeth dove into the fire with wet blankets, sacks, and buckets of water, all to no avail. “I left the store through a sheet of flames and saw the earnings of years consumed,” Huntington said.
He reckoned he lost $50,000 in the fire; but with his family now settled in California, he saw no choice but to dig in and rebuild. This time the scale was less grand. He scrimped and saved, doing most of the carpentering himself and holding down costs to about $2,000. “During those niggardly years Collis did grow hard and calculating,” writes David Lavender, “cheery on the surface because his dealings demanded that, Old Huntington still, a local character in his floppy Panama hat, but underneath, suspicious and alert.”
Equally significant, Huntington completely severed business ties with his brother back in Oneonta and entered into partnership with Mark Hopkins, a Sacramento neighbor whose store had also been razed by the fire.
Huntington was then thirty and Hopkins eight years older, almost elderly by gold rush standards. Hopkins had been born in upstate New York, on the shores of Lake Ontario, in 1813, and on the frontier he cut an unlikely figure. He ate no meat and grew his own vegetables. He spoke softly and with a lisp. He hated waste and, when a multimillionaire, chastised clerks for throwing away blotting paper that could still be used. Often, in the streets, his gangling, loose-limbed frame would be seen leaning down to retrieve a rusty bolt or some other piece of scrap iron. He was miserly yet had no particular fondness for money; later, when he had lots, he would actually apologize for the fact. He had a long, thin face and a long, thin nose atop a long, thin beard. He looked like he’d been pinched or squeezed or nipped in the bud. All this makes him sound like Dickens’s Scrooge, which may not be far from the mark. Like Huntington, he’d come west with the original 49ers and established himself as a storekeeper. Unlike Huntington, he had no taste for the hurly-burly. He described himself as a man who could not create a business but knew how to make one go. He was faddish and cranky. He worked until the small hours, poring over columns of figures. He mistrusted complexities and involvements; was fundamentally pliant and good-natured yet immensely stubborn.
Huntington and Hopkins: it seems unlikely, a joining of hot and cold, of temper and calm, of red meat and pale gruel, but the alliance would turn out to be key, lucky and lasting. They were ideal business foils, Hopkins benefiting from Huntington’s ambition while never afraid to rein in plans and schemes that looked over-ambitious. Huntington, in turn, soon came to respect the other man’s judgment. He used his energies in the wider world, tracking goods, driving the hard bargains, cornering the market in shovels or lamps while Hopkins ran the store and kept the books; later Hopkins would show he knew how to cook them too.
“Hopkins had a keen analytical mind and was thoroughly accurate. He was strictly an office man,” wrote Huntington. Hopkins observed tersely: “Huntington was a bulldog.”
Their store, Huntington, Hopkins & Co., was at 54 K Street in Sacramento. It flourished. Soon they had thirty clerks working for them, young men towards whom Huntington and Hopkins adopted a strict attitude, as though they were running a YMCA. Sacramento boasted on every corner “a gilded palace of infamy.” Saloons. Whorehouses. Taverns. A high-end gambling hotel where the minimum stake was $1,000, gold. Plenty of other places that were less ritzy, dens. Riverboats pounding through the night. The hammer and boom of the frontier. Huntington and Hopkins insisted by contract that their employees not drink, gamble, or visit houses of ill repute. In return, they offered bed and board, decent wages, and a lending library, one of the first in California. Benevolence was really just good business.
Huntington and Hopkins were merchants, perhaps resentful of this role of civic leadership that necessity thrust upon them. But they were on the frontier, creating a new state, a fledgling new order, and of course they were open to fresh ideas. They welcomed, certainly, the idea of the railroad. So did almost everybody in California. “The Iron Horse, gentlemen, THE IRON HORSE, THE IRON HORSE,THE IRON HORSE—give it to us at once and our consequent gratitude shall tell you how much we appreciate the gift,” wrote Hutchings’ California Magazine. Still, Huntington and Hopkins knew nothing about the practicalities of railroading, and they would no more have thought about laying track than building a bridge to the moon. Then Theodore Judah came into their lives.